The team in Kenya and the UK say the finding has “enormous potential” to control the disease.

Malaria is spread by the bite of infected mosquitoes, so protecting them could in turn protect people.

The researchers are now investigating whether they can release infected mosquitoes into the wild, or use spores to suppress the disease.
What is this microbe?

The malaria-blocking bug, Microsporidia MB, was discovered by studying mosquitoes on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya. It lives in the gut and genitals of the insects.

The researchers could not find a single mosquito carrying the Microsporidia that was harbouring the malaria parasite. And lab experiments, published in Nature Communications, confirmed the microbe gave the mosquitoes protection.

Microsporidias are fungi, or at least closely related to them, and most are parasites.

However, this new species may be beneficial to the mosquito and was naturally found in around 5% of the insects studied.
How big a discovery is it?

“The data we have so far suggest it is 100% blockage, it’s a very severe blockage of malaria,” Dr Jeremy Herren, from the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Kenya told the BBC.

He added: “It will come as a quite a surprise. I think people will find that a real big breakthrough.”

More than 400,000 people are killed by malaria each year, most of them children under the age of five.

While huge progress has been made through the use of bed nets and spraying homes with insecticide, this has stalled in recent years. It is widely agreed new tools are needed to tackle malaria.
Image copyright Getty Images
Image caption Bed nets have helped cut the number of people infected with malaria around the world
How does the microbe stop malaria?

The fine details still need to be worked out.

But Microsporidia MB could be priming the mosquito’s immune system, so it is more able to fight off infections.

Or the presence of the microbe in the insect could be having a profound effect on the mosquito’s metabolism, making it inhospitable for the malaria parasite.

Microsporidia MB infections appear to be life-long. If anything, the experiments show they become more intense, so the malaria-blocking effect would be long-lasting.
When can this be used against malaria?

At the very least, 40% of mosquitoes in a region need to be infected with Microsporidia in order to make a significant dent in malaria.

The microbe can be passed between adult mosquitoes and is also passed from the female to her offspring.

So, the researchers are investigating two main strategies for increasing the number of infected mosquitoes.

• Microsporidia form spores which could be released en masse to infect mosquitoes

• Male mosquitoes (which don’t bite) could be infected in the lab and released into the wild to infect the females when they have sex

“It’s a new discovery. We are very excited by its potential for malaria control. It has enormous potential,” Prof Steven Sinkins, from the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, told the BBC.

This concept of disease control using microbes is not unprecedented. A type of bacteria called Wolbachia has been shown to make it harder for mosquitoes to spread dengue fever in real-world trials.

• Bacterial allies make dengue fever cases dive

• GM fungus rapidly kills 99% of malaria mosquitoes

What happens next?

The scientists need to understand how the microbe spreads, so they plan to perform more tests in Kenya.

However, these approaches are relatively uncontroversial as the species is already found in wild mosquitoes and is not introducing something new.

It also would not kill the mosquitoes, so would not have an impact on ecosystems that are dependent on them as food. This is part of other strategies like a killer fungus that can almost completely collapse mosquito populations in weeks.

Jon Almeida is the founder of ‘imaging’ the virus, and in the current global outbreak, his discovery is once again the focus of the whole world.

Code 19 is a new virus, but it is also a variant of the Corona virus, which Dr. Alameda identified in the laboratory of St Thomas’s Hospital in London in 1964.

Jon Hart, a virologist, was born in 1930 in the northeastern part of Glasgow, Scotland, and spent his childhood in the poorest part of the city.

He left school at the age of 16 and had his regular education disconnected, but got a laboratory technician job at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, a Glasgow hospital.

She later moved to London to pursue a career where in 1954 she married Venezuelan artist Enriquez Almeida.What is the difference between corona virus and flu?

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Research on common nozzles

The couple later moved to Toronto, Canada with their daughter. According to George Winters, an author in the field of medicine, Dr. Almeida had the opportunity to specialize in electron microscopy at the Ontario Cancer Research Institute, a cancer research institute in Ontario, Canada.

Here they laid the foundation for a way in which the virus could be better visualized using antibodies.

George Winters told the BBC that in recognition of his abilities, Britain encouraged him to return home and in 1964 he returned to London to work at St Thomas’ Medical School.

This is the same hospital where current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was recently admitted to the Corona virus.

At this London hospital, he began working with Dr. David Tyrell, who was conducting research on the common cold in Wiltshire County, Salisbury.

George Winters says Dr. Tyrell was observing samples obtained from volunteers that his team found that they had succeeded in eliminating several viruses that could be linked to common colds, but Not all germs or viruses were detected.

A sample, identified as ‘B814’, was obtained from a student at Surrey County’s boarding school.

They also found that they could transmit symptoms of common cold to volunteers, but they could not reproduce them in normal ‘cell culture’ in laboratories.

The volunteers’ research proved that their ‘organ culture’ is booming, and Dr. Tyrell was curious as to whether they could be seen with an electron microscope.

He sent these samples to Jun Almadi, who looked at the virus particles in a sample and said they were similar to ‘influenza’ viruses but not exactly the same.

What they identified became the first human corona virus.

George Winters said that Dr. Almeida had also seen such particles before when he was researching rat jaundice and poultry ‘bronchitis’ - throat and lung disease.

But his thesis, which was rejected in a journal of his contemporaries in which experts say that the photographs made by Dr. Almeida are bad images of influenza virus particles.

A new discovery of this ‘B814’ breed was published in the British Medical General in 1965, and the image he saw was released two years later in the journal General Virology.

According to George Winter, Dr. Tyrell and Dr. Almeida, together with Professor Tony Watson, who is in charge of St. Thomas’s Hospital, named it the Corona virus because it had a ‘crown’ or crown crown around it.

Dr. Almeida later worked at the London Postgraduate Medical School, where he was awarded a doctorate.

His professional life culminated in the Wicklem Institute, where he received numerous patents for his name in the ‘imaging’ field of the virus.

After leaving the Wellcome Institute, Dr. Alameda began training in yoga but continued consulting in the field of virology and in 1980 helped to create a unique image of the HIV virus.

June Almeida passed away in 2007 at the age of 77.

Now 13 years after his death, he is finally being acknowledged for his work which he deserves as its founder and because of his work, the epidemic that engulfs the entire world today. Has helped a lot in understanding what has happened